n the case of this boy
who set himself consciously to be famous when he was eight, wrote
fine imaginative verse before he was thirteen, and killed himself aged
seventeen and nine months.

Thomas, then, was a moody baby, a dull small boy who knew few of his
letters at four; and was superannuated--such was his impenetrability
to learning--at the age of five from the school of which his father
had been master. He was moreover till the age of six and a half so
frequently subject to long fits of abstraction and of apparently
causeless crying that his mother and grandmother feared for his
reason and thought him 'an absolute fool.' We are told also by his
sister--and there is no incongruity in the two accounts--that he
early displayed a taste for 'preheminence and would preside over his
playmates as their master and they his hired servants.' At seven and
a half he dissipated his mother's fear that she had borne a fool
by rapidly learning to read in a great black-letter Bible; for
characteristically 'he objected to read in a small book.' In a very
short time from this he appears to have devoured eagerly the contents
of every volume he could lay his hands on. He had a thirst for
knowledge at large--for any kind of information, and as the merest
child read with a careless voracity books of heraldry, history,
astronomy, theology, and such other subjects as would repel most
children, and perhaps one may say, most men. At the age of eight
we hear of him reading 'all day or as long as they would let him,'
confident that he was going to be famous, and promising his mother and
sister 'a great deal of finery' for their care of him when the day of
his fame arrived. Before he was nine he was nominated for Colston's
Hospital, a local school where the Bluecoat dress was worn and at
which the 'three Rs' were taught but very little else, so that the
boy, disappointed of the hope of knowledge, complained he could
work better at home. To this period we should probably assign the
delightful story of Chatterton and a friendly potter who promised to
give him an earthenware bowl with what inscription he pleased upon
it--such writing presumably intended to be 'Tommy his bowl' or 'Tommy
Chatterton'. 'Paint me,' said the small boy to the friendly potter,
'an Angel with Wings and a Trumpet to trumpet my Name over the World.'

At ten he was making progress in arithmetic, and it should be
mentioned that he 'occupied himself with mechanical pursuits so